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external hard drive backups

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wraith808:
Depends on whose computer you're storing them on.
-wraith808 (July 10, 2017, 08:08 AM)
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Do you only entrust your personal files to people whose lies are not too obvious?
-Tuxman (July 10, 2017, 08:11 AM)
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You love reductionist absurdist arguments, instead of engaging, don't you?  So that people waste time constructing meaningful arguments that you have no defense for right?  Not falling for that this time, but I will give a similar time to you in my argument against yours.

Encryption Keys.

I forgot wasn't being backed up.
-mouser (July 10, 2017, 08:19 AM)
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This is the issue, I think.  Backup plans should be thought through.  And the ability to just backup your whole machine (especially for non critical uses) makes you lazy in my experience.  Yes, I agree for servers and such that it is critical to keep up.  But for my development and such (which is my only critical use) I have my source in a non-local VCS, and my environment duplicated on my other machines (instead of trying to make my machine a standing and sitting desk, I have two stations that I work on- in addition to my remote machines that have the same), so it's really not necessary for me to waste the space to back up 5 different machines totally.  Just had this happen on one of my work machines, and I was able to keep working on another machine, and after I got my primary back up and running, I was able to get it functional in the time it took me to install dropbox and sync it, onedrive and sync it, and visual studio, and my other utilities I use by using a script that I keep on my dropbox to pull and install everything else that I don't have portable on dropbox from Chocolatey. 

I guess it really depends on your workflow rather than doing what works well for someone else.

Depends on whose computer you're storing them on.  This is a spurious argument facilitated by people as it distills it down to anyone's computer with any security in place, and it's just wrong.
-wraith808 (July 10, 2017, 08:08 AM)
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It is not completely wrong. Besides, what type of data are you backing up and is it possible to get into legal trouble? For example: you work from home and store by accident or as an ad-hoc transfer solution, store your work on your cloud account. In my case, I would get into serious legal trouble, even for the briefest of time that work would be on any server other my own or at the customer. You better make sure something similar doesn't apply to your personal situation when you (accidentally) mix work/private stuff using any cloud solution.
-Shades (July 10, 2017, 09:16 AM)
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It might not be completely wrong for your use, but as I stated above, having it fully encrypted with you being the only holder of the keys makes it spurious, other than as you say, legal ramifications.  But that argument argues against any use of cloud storage, which is misguided and wrong, IMO.

app103:
I am looking at the WD My Passport or a WD My Book.
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Or the software that comes with the drive be good enough?
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Good drives, I have a few of them. Crappy backup software, though. First thing I do when I get a new Passport drive is delete that software. It's a complete waste of space.

Is cloud storage safe to use?  Are my cloud files at risk of becoming infected if a file becomes infected on my computer? 
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Dropbox has file versioning, so even if something does mess up your files stored there, you can always revert to previous good version of them. And the versioning doesn't eat into your allowed storage space.

What I would do is set the Dropbox folder to your Passport drive, then back up your files to the Dropbox folder. (paid accounts offer 1 TB of space)

That way, if something happens to your PC (hardware failure, dead main drive, etc.), you can just plug the Passport drive into another computer and keep moving along. And if something happens to your Passport drive, you can get another one, set Dropbox to sync to the new drive, and keep moving along. And if something happens to both your computer and your passport drive (fire, flood, tornado, etc), you can get another computer, and another Passport drive, then sync from Dropbox onto the new one, and keep moving along.


It is not completely wrong. Besides, what type of data are you backing up and is it possible to get into legal trouble? For example: you work from home and store by accident or as an ad-hoc transfer solution, store your work on your cloud account. In my case, I would get into serious legal trouble, even for the briefest of time that work would be on any server other my own or at the customer. You better make sure something similar doesn't apply to your personal situation when you (accidentally) mix work/private stuff using any cloud solution.
-Shades (July 10, 2017, 09:16 AM)
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There are some of us (me) that work from home and absolutely must store work related files in the cloud, and for them to be sharable with customers, in order to perform our jobs. And my employer was mighty glad that I have a Dropbox account with ample storage space when this happened and made it impossible for customers to download their purchases.

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